The present invention relates to an electronic dictionary device which is capable of displaying one or more synonyms of a word which is entered through suitable input means such as keys corresponding to letters of a language.
An electronic dictionary is known, which uses a dictionary memory M as shown in FIG. 8. The dictionary memory stores vocabulary data which consists of a multiplicity of word data representative of words of a language. As shown in FIG. 8, the vocabulary data are stored in a vocabulary storage section 1 which comprises many word-data memory locations at which the respective word data are stored. Corresponding to the word-data memory locations, there are provided synonym-data memory locations which constitute a synonym-data storage section 2. In each of the synonym-data memory locations, there is stored at least one synonym data which represents a synonym of a word stored in the corresponding word-data memory location. The word-data memory location and the synonym-data memory location constitute a data memory location. Thus, the dictionary memory M which consists of the vocabulary storage section 1 and the synonym-data storage section 2, comprises multiple data memory locations identified by respective addresses which correspond to multiple different words and multiple sets of synonyms of these different words.
For example, as shown in FIG. 9, word-data representing a word "CONSIDER" is stored in the word-data memory location 1' of the first data memory location. In the corresponding synonym-data memory location 2', there are stored synonym-data which represent synonyms of the word "CONSIDER", such as "THINK", "REFLECT", and "DELIBERATE". Accordingly, each of such synonym-data memory location 2' uses a larger memory area than the corresponding word-data memory location 1' which stores the word data for a single word. Therefore, the synonym-data storage section 2 is required to have a relatively larger memory capacity, which leads to increased memory capacity requirement of the dictionary memory M.